Defining Moments
by enigma939
Summary: Novel-verse. When David Webb sleeps, fragmented memories of his past come back to haunt, reminding him of the man he once was, and possibly still might be. SPOILERS for the first novel.


**Defining Moments**

**A/N: **Okay, this is basically novel-verse and set sometime after _The Bourne Identity _and before _The Bourne Supremacy_. It's basically a recap of Bourne's backstory through his fragmented recollections, from the death of his family till the incident that triggered his amnesia.

His past may have been locked away from the surface of his consciousness, in an abyss of darkness his mind could not penetrate...but it still existed. It _lived _on within him, in his sub-consciousness, like a silent predator hiding in the foliage, waiting to strike when least expected, under the cover of the night. And so it was that in the odd hours, thin, _very _thin, infinitesimal rays of light penetrated the cloak of darkness...and his still living past revealed itself bit by bit...like fragments of a broken mirror, reflecting the sunlight...

_It was early morning. The jungle was silent and silent. The early rays of sunshine penetrated the foliage and were reflected in the river. There was peace and quiet...Tranquillity itself reigned here...seemingly detached from the violence that had engulfed the outside world._

_But no more...first there were the sounds of engines, then the birds of steel descended, followed by the sound of gunfire. There were screams and there was blood. The screams of his family. The blood of his wife and children. And barely had he realised the fact than that the aerial engines of destruction that had rained death from the skies had disappeared over the horizon. DEATH. Dao, Joshua, Alyssa...his family, his loves, his _life_...all gone in one moment of insanity. And there was nothing he could do...nothing but cradle their mutilated bodies in his arms and scream at the skies...scream with grief and rage...and above all...vengeance..._

_The nightmare had changed. The jungle and the blood had dissolved into a room. A ward. A hospital ward, a psychiatric ward to treat victims of trauma. Mental trauma. He could see himself, the bereaved widower, staring into the nothingness that was now both his past and his future...letting the present slip by...barely absorbing the words of the man seated next to him. "I know how you feel, David...but you have to accept it...they're not coming back...and nothing you can do will change that fact. You can't change the past...but you can change the present, _your _present, if you really want to. You can make the pain go away, by channelizing it...turning it into something...better. Something more productive"._

"_How?" he asked hoarsely, a drowning man desperate for an answer, _any _answer that would free him from this insanity. From those five minutes that played and re-played themselves endlessly in his mind._

_And that was when Conklin told him about the program. About the clandestine pool of trained spies, infiltrators and mercenaries he was building...highly skilled, supremely capable living weapons...chameleons who could blend into any environment...predators who could overcome any prey. A regimen of indoctrination and conditioning so potent that it could cleanse any man of the shackles of his past. A means, not of eliminating the rage, but of turning it outwards...into death. Death to the enemy._

_And somehow, he knew then it was the only answer...and so he said yes...walking away in that moment forever from the ashes of his old life, and succumbing to the darkness of the new one the program promised him..._

_The stench of the jungle was nauseating, but barely more so than the stench of death. Eight days of madness and bloodlust. The hunt had consumed him completely as it has so often before since the day he'd first stepped out into the field. But this hunt brought with it none of the detachment which previous ones had brought...this hunt was personal. And nothing would stop him. NOTHING. Not the enemy's minions...not his own men, exhausted beyond reason by the crushing stress and danger to which he'd exposed them...nothing and no one. Not when he was so close._

_He had his way in, thinned out the numbers like he'd been taught too, with his knife, his gun, his wire and his hands. And at last he reached his objective. His brother, barely alive, battered and bruised in his cage. He freed the delirious captive of his enemies, the last family he had left in this world...his last link to the life he'd long abandoned._

_And then, without warning, the chase resumed. He pursued the traitorous member of his own team...the double agent who had led him into this trap. He stalked him through the jungle, cornered him and shot him in the head._

_Later, he would be told that the man's real name had been Jason Bourne...he had been a mercenary and a drug dealer...a piece of filth who'd sold out to the enemy. A piece of filth who had got what he deserved. And yet, the unsanctioned execution rankled with his handlers. There were murmurs among the higher-ups; claims that he was unstable, insane even...But he didn't care. He knew he had become indispensable to them...an indispensable weapon. A killer who was prepared to kill where other killers weren't...the ultimate spy, the ultimate predator...the supreme assassin._

_He was in front of a mirror...a mirror in a bedroom on the top floor of a respectable looking brownstone house on 71__st__ Street in the heart of New York City. Staring at his own reflection...at a face he scarcely recognised. The years of hunting, of retreating, striking and killing had erased any vestiges of the man he once was. The rage was still there, but having been turned outwards, it no longer burned him as much as it did inside. Just as Conklin had said._

_It was Conklin who had brought him here. Conklin who had brought him back to the cloak and dagger world dedicated to fighting terror with terror, at any cost. Conklin had told him that they were moving into the next phase of the program. Instead of reacting, as they had in the jungles, they would now _take _the fight to the enemy. Take the fight to the sellers of death and the mastermind who sat in the centre of that elusive web of destruction that stretched across several continents-Carlos, the Jackal. He had been given a 'special assignment', one in which he could all too easily lose himself. Which was fine by him, because losing himself was something he had been seeking to achieve since that fateful morning so long ago now, and yet never _too _long ago in his memory..._

_He looked down at the passport he held in his hands. One among several he had been given. He opened it and stared at the name on the front page...Jason Bourne. It was a name familiar to him...the name of a man he had killed. The name of a killer and a terrorist. A name which he would now possess and use in his quest to hunt other killers. It was perhaps a fitting metaphor... _becoming _the enemy in order to fight the enemy. Donning wolf's clothing to hunt other wolves._

_And in that moment, he felt reborn..._

_He stalked death on the streets of Paris...the filthy back alleys and dark boroughs of the City of Light. He was invincible, the man with a thousand faces, the predator who could blend into any environment, become anyone and anything. The killer whose exploits were rapidly becoming the stuff of legend among the less savoury elements of society._

_It was living this life, an illusion though it was, that had almost cured him...cleansed his mind and his memory in a perverse manner...replacing emotion, debilitating emotion, with cold and calculating precision, liberating machine-like efficiency and ruthlessness. The program had changed him the first time round, but even in the jungles he was himself...empowered with the skill of inflicting pain...but ultimately the same man who'd lost everything he'd cared for in that river of death. But now, immersing himself in another life, another _identity _had...freed him. Freed him from the burden of grief that was David Webb's. Perhaps it was the fact that Jason Bourne was a myth, fundamentally detached from reality despite all appearances to the contrary; and perhaps believing the myth, experiencing it day and night, was permitted him to detach himself from reality as well. Dissociate himself from a world where three bullet-ridden corpses floated in a river. Conklin had warned him this would happen...but he didn't care. It was what he wanted after all. It was why he had signed up for this._

_And as he walked this lonely path, he was aware that Carlos' men were watching him, measuring and analysing his every move. It didn't matter to him...for as they observed him, he observed them and instinctively made decisions and calculations which ordinary men could scarcely comprehend. And before they had the opportunity to emerge from the darkness, he dove into it and struck them down one by one, thinning the numbers as he always did, sending a message to that killer of killers...telling the Jackal that every day, every hour, every minute...the Chameleon was closing in on him. _

_Being the killer who hunted killers...that was what he did best._

_The trap had been sprung!_

_Not the trap _he _had set for Carlos in the midst of the stormy Mediterranean...but the trap sprung by the hired killers from the Marseilles waterfront. The scum whom he had paid to lead him to the assassin. He had been lead out to sea and then ambushed. There were three men on board the trawler, the skipper who he'd negotiated with earlier that evening, and two thugs who had lain hidden below-deck._

_He had survived worse odds before...and yet this small fishing boat was no vast jungle, and there he was at a disadvantage. He had wounded one of the thugs but the other two were still mobile, still hunting him._

_There was one chance...the timed explosives he carried. If he could set them, and then escape the craft, he would have eliminated his would be killers and freed himself from the trap! He ducked into a cabin, set the timer...and with the hypersensitivity born of nearly a decade of killing he suddenly knew he was not alone in the darkened room. He raced out of the cabin just as the first two shots rang out, striking him in the back, the pain excruciating...intolerable...but he marched on swiftly towards the railings...just a few more paces...a few more inches...and he would have won..._

_But more shots rang out and the violence of the sea greeted him, its blackness consuming him. For what seemed like an eternity he knew pain as he had never known it before...and then he grew detached from pain...detached from everything else. He felt his mind slipping away from the edge of consciousness...and then at last there was peace. And oblivion._

David Webb sat up in his bed, the very vividness of that last nightmare, that last fragment of memory shocking him out of sleep.

He made his way to the washroom, and as he had so often over the past several months, drenched his face with cold water. He then stepped out onto the balcony, letting the sea wind engulf him, as his past had engulfed him through the night.

These nightmares, visions of his forgotten past had haunted him night after night. Every night, he learned a little more about himself. About the man he had been before he had woken up as an amnesiac in Port Noir. He knew now a bit more about the traumas that had driven him, the forces that had shaped him into the killing machine; the supreme hunter that was Jason Bourne. And as much as these revelations shocked him, they worried him as well. Was he really that different today? Was the David Webb who had emerged from the sea, who had subsequently been reinvented, stitched together from torn fragments by psychiatrists, really different from David Webb who had lost his family by that river so many years ago? Could the man whom the Treadstone program had metamorphosis into the nemesis of Carlos possibly be the same man he was today? After all, he knew that the Bourne identity still lived on inside him, that he would be prepared to kill once more if Marie or the children they would one day have were ever threatened. He knew he would never let his family be taken from him ever again. And he knew that a part of him would forever mourn the deaths of Dao, Joshua and Alyssa, no matter how faint the memories were. Perhaps the experiences that had shaped him, the defining moments that had made him what he was, however remote they might be in his shattered memory, would continue to influence him. Or perhaps amnesia, in his case, would be a balm that would soothe his scarred mind, enabling him to finally walk away from the torments of his past once and for all. As always, he thirsted for answers.


End file.
